Help

Table of Contents

Searching

You can perform a simple search by typing keywords in the search box and clicking "Search". The search engine will return results that include all of your search terms.

You can search for an exact phrase by placing quotation marks around your search terms, for example "new plymouth".

Boolean operators AND, OR and NOT can be used to refine your search results. AND (include all of the words) and NOT (without the words) narrow your search; OR (with at least one of the words) broadens your search. For example, plymouth NOT new will retrieve articles about Plymouth but not New Plymouth. You can group clauses using parentheses, for example (hamilton OR waikato) AND river.

On the search results page, the "Search limited to" area shows any filters that were applied to the search. You can remove these by clicking the "x" icons. The "Refine search" area shows the most common values occurring in various categories in the search results. Selecting one of these facets applies it as a search filter.

Advanced search

The Advanced search tab allows you to limit your search results by:

A date range

It also allows you to search within full text/article headlines, choose the number of search results you want displayed on each page, and choose whether you would like text or image previews displayed with your search results.

Advanced query syntax

Query terms can be boosted to increase their importance in the search, changing the order of the search results. This is done by adding "^" and a boost factor at the end of the term, e.g. hamilton river^2 will treat "river" as more important than "hamilton" when ranking the search results returned.

Wildcard searches can be performed by including "?" (single character wildcard) or "*" (multiple character wildcard) in the query term. For example, hamilt* will match all words starting with "hamilt".

Fuzzy searching can be done by adding "~1" at the end of individual terms, e.g. roam~1 will find terms like "foam" and "roams" as well as "roam". This can help to compensate for errors in the text due to the Optical Character Recognition process.

Proximity searching allows you to search for words that appear close together in the text. For example, "John Smith"~3 will find results containing both the words "John" and "Smith" where they are no more than 3 words apart. So as well as finding "John Smith" it will also find "John J. Smith", "John Frederick Smith", "John Fullerton-Smith", and even "Smith, John".

Optical Character Recognition

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a process by which software reads a page image and translates it into a text file by recognising the shapes of the letters (The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials).

OCR enables searching of large quantities of full-text data, but it is never 100% accurate. The level of accuracy depends on the print quality of the original issue, its condition at the time of microfilming, the level of detail captured by the microfilm scanner, and the quality of the OCR software. Issues with poor quality paper, small print, mixed fonts, multiple column layouts, or damaged pages may have poor OCR accuracy.

The searchable text and titles in this collection have been automatically generated using OCR software. They have not been manually reviewed or corrected.

To look at the OCR text, select the page/article and click the "Text of this page/Text of this article" link.

Printing

Articles can be printed directly from your web browser, after selecting the article and clicking the "Clip this article" link.

If available, PDF versions of issues and pages can be downloaded for printing.

Technical requirements

In general, you only need a common web browser like Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera or Microsoft Edge to search and browse this collection. To view or print PDFs, you will also need a PDF viewer like Adobe Reader.